In this industry, lots of people have the wrong perception of Perl, for some reason... This is different from knowing Perl's weak point. Knowing perl's weak point is based on knowledge and experience, but lots of people never used Perl, however they got this negative impression from somewhere.

I have two stories to share. First story, one day I was talking to two guys in my team. They were trying to come up with a piece of PL/SQL package to do something that was simple. I told them that they really don't need a PL/SQL package, all they need is one query (obviously the query would be a little bit tricky than usual). We talked about it, and they got my point and agreed. At the end, one guy made this comment "this is just like what those Perl guys do, they always try to compete and see whose program uses less characters." I didn't make any comment, cause that's not relevant any way. But obviously somehow from somewhere they got this impression that Perl or Perl programmers were less serious.

If the problem in the first story is with others, not us Perl programers, then the second story is about ourselves. A guy recently left the company, he was one of few guys used Perl. This is not a Perl shop, so those who use Perl only use it for their own benefits, and there is absolutely no code review etc. This morning, someone had a question about his Perl code, and came to me. I looked at his code, wow, there is absolutely no use strict, or use warnings, and this goes on and on with all the bad styles.

Just like what you have said, there certainly is a need for us to plant the seeds, and the good seeds, so that others see what good plants Perl grows, and change their perception about Perl.